This invention relates to a camera with a panoramic photography mode for taking panoramic photographs. A panoramic photograph is a wide angle photograph covering a wide area on both right and left sides, and the photographic technique is often used for mountain photographs and aggregation photographs. There are two methods available for taking panoramic photographs; one is to use a dedicated panoramic camera and the other is to use a usual camera.
In the latter case, to change the direction of the optical axis of the photographic lens on the same plane by preventing the camera from moving vertically or sloping in the vertical plane, that is, to allow the camera to rotate, it is general to fix the camera to a tripod or an appropriate stand. Most of the time, when a camera is held by hands for taking photographs, satisfactory results cannot be produced. A panoramic photograph can be completed by fixing a camera, for example, to a tripod as mentioned above, taking a photograph in a certain photographic direction, remembering the edge of the finder field, rotating the camera to a new photographic direction, taking a photograph once again so that the previously remembered part is overlapped with the edge of the new photographic area, repeating this processing several times, and overlapping and connecting the edges of the photographs.
When the above method is used, however, photographer's intuition and experience are much required, the overlapped part between photographs becomes too wide, causing waste of films, or no overlapped part is provided, causing a defectively connected photograph. Therefore, it is difficult to obtain good panoramic photographs by this method.
The object of the present invention is to provide an apparatus for simply taking clean panoramic photographs without waste of films by solving the above problems.